初期ギリシアの石工用具について ―鉄製用具導入の観点から―

抄録

Iron metallurgy was widely understood in the Eastern Mediterranean only after 1000 B. c., and objects manufactured from iron appeared on a large scale from about 800 B C One might imagine that the Iron Age in Greece began about 1000 B. c., but recently A.M. Snodgrass has published his opinion that archaeological evidence has confirmed a reaction in favour of bronze, indicating that the introduction of iron caused no radical change in the politics or economy of the period In short, we must relinquish the view of a revolutionary change in Greek society caused by iron products in favour of one of gradual change. The introduction of iron and its general use for masons1 tools meant that they could achieve more work for less labour, time and cost, because of the difficulty of working the hard material with the earlier tools. This permitted the stonemasons of the Late Archaic Age to achieve the great age of temple building in the 6th century B. C. The tools which they used were the pick or pickhammer, point, flat-edged chisel, curved chisel, drove, claw or toothed chisel, drill, rasp and abrasives. The most important among them was the claw chisel that had a cutting edge serrated like saw teeth, and that has been acknowledged as a Greek invention, especially on the mainland. Its marks left on stone date from the second quarter of the 6th century B. C., and its use would probably have spread throughout the Greek world by about 550 B. C. The invention of the claw enabled masons to save time and labour, as the four-toothed tool could accomplish four times as much at a blow as one with singlepoint. These days We have been able to establish that Ionians brought from Greece to Iran the new techniques of using the claw, drill and so on. The most memorable of them was Chersiphron, an architect working on the Artemis temple at Ephesus, who devised a new instrument like enormous garden rollers for transporting great columns, which was probably employed at Persepolis. In conclusion, the technology of Greco-Lydian masonry had come into being by the late 7th century B. C., and spread to Persia with the beginning of the Achaemenian style, following the conquest of the west coast of Asia Minor by King Cyrus, and this stone-working sphere of the Eastern Mediterranean formed by that event, which brought Ionian craftsmen their access to Persia, continued till the early 5th century B. C The reason why Greek craftsmen could attain such wide influence was the rationalisation of time and labour ― to be more specific, the improvement of stonemasons' tools enabled them to process hard stone rapidly and efficiently, in circumstances in which the polis society, the tiny Greek community, could never expect great manpower or wealth like the big powers in the Near East.